Collaborative masses...

I was  - driven by experience in collaboration through online platforms in my professional and educational life - looking on the internet for (a) an explanation as to why it seems to be difficult to get everyone on board in a project and (b) possible solutions to overcome the difficulties I encounter.

Let me take a step back first. I am not always happy in the way teamwork leads to results. In my work (I write proposals for the EU - with input from other collaborators), I often am the 'last-in-line', waiting for the contributions of others, before I can do my work; yet my deadline for submitting the proposal to the EU is fixed. The people I work with are dispersed all over Europe - and we rarely meet face-2-face. And no matter which agreements have been made, and irrespective of the tools we use, the contributions are often late and elements are missing or not as well elaborated as expected. One could say I would need to manage better - but more dictatorial colleagues have the same experience.

I use my own project management platform - OpenSource, prof. Questier - to manage deadlines, milestones and document flow. At the university, we use PointCarré. In all situations I use email. These are asynchronous platforms that allow people to work at their own pace. Chat programmes such as Skype or google talk - which allow 'real-time conversations' are mainly used as replacements for telephone conversations.

In all these situations - professional & educational - I find that agreements reached, especially on deadlines and quality are not respected as much as after a f2f meeting. Let alone the amount of work done by each of the participants in the process. And I know that I am not alone in having this experience. Although PointCarré provides the tools - fora, document exchange and even chat - we have all held f2f meetings to coordinate group work. And reading the feedback on such meetings on the fora, It seems that all of us have had more use of these real meetings than through online collaboration.

I concede, we do not all start with the same level of confidence, knowledge or even reflex to use a computer. But in my professional life, online life is a must, and all involved are as apt to create things on a computer as the next person.

The following article seems to share some of my views on the necessity for f2f meetings.

"After spending just an hour with my clients, I had a significantly deeper sense of who they were, how they operated and their personalities. All of which will make me more productive in working with them in the future. Besides, when I email them now, or speak to them on the phone, I can see their faces in my mind’s eye."

In the same article, Karen Leland quotes author Joanne Black, who is not surprised by the strong feelings businesspeople have about the productivity-enhancing properties of in-person contact: 

“We have become so organized around technology that we have almost forgotten what it’s like to talk to people, ... But when you find yourself face-to-face with someone, you realize you can explore, ask questions, keep asking more questions and get to the heart of the matter.”

In the educational setting that we are in, one could argue that there are different learning styles and that e-learning (blended or not) should take these differences into account. And then there is the old (1974) adage of Wilbur Schramm - used in communication theory, but just as pertinent in this context: 

... we should not ask whether one means of delivery is better than another, but what are the conditions that determine the appropriate choice of technology...

And I believe that one of these conditions that need to be looked at is the absence of (social) control when people are left to work to their own devices. Online work often is not as closely scrutinized and supervised as 'in situ' work and hence requires a more disciplined approach. Cisco (an IT company) has done some research on the mobile workforce - the category that uses online collaboration to complete its tasks. In it's study, 'self-motivation' is mentioned as the second most important challenge for 'mobile workers':

"...Mobile workers do not receive the same levels of formal or informal supervision as office workers and therefore are more reliant on self-motivation to meet their goals"

The same study also provides some cues for the management, such as the need for weekly contact and regular f2f meetings.

But my online research also led me to some surprising discoveries. One great example of massive online collaborative work - unbeknownst to the 'workers' has helped create hundreds of thousands of digitized books. In the following TED Talk, the inventor of the CAPTCHA, those annoying squiggly letters that you use to authenticate yourself on different websites,   explains how - with the new two-word ReCAPTCHA that is used on 300.000+ websites is actually a tool to help with the recognition of scanned words from old books. 

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. 

Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which th answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Neat!!!!

Here is the full video of the TED TALK: